Pasta Carbonara for Your Guy, Pasta Carbonara for Yourself

Winter is hard! It’s freezing all the time (is it illegal that my radiator has yet to turn on?), it gets dark so early that you can’t help constantly thinking about death, AND you’re expected to maintain a relationship through it all. But! As we learned last Monday, Cosmo has got us covered on the subject, and they’re even backing it up with SCIENCE:

“Our energy levels are lower during the cold weather, and we tend to be moodier,” explains clinical psychologist Seth Meyers, PhD. “Both factors make maintaining a relationship difficult.”

So you put down the magazine to go on an endorphin-boosting snowball fight with your dude, and you come back starving. Now what? Do you have a Cosmo-approved sexy meal of cottage cheese, or do you take a page from the meal plan of any athlete looking for an energy boost? You do the second thing, that’s what you do. You make some pasta. What kind of pasta? Pasta will dairy and bacon in it, duh. Everyone knows that girls can’t resist fatty dairy products (the skim milk in the coffee is just a show), and bacon is just the thing to get Your Guy in the mood.

First things first: It’s good that you’ve already “[thrown] on one of his sweaters with nothing underneath,” both to “hide any problem areas” and because frying bacon topless is one of the worst things you can do.

Boil some of water and add a shitload of salt. Bonus! This will heat up your apartment (trust the girl with the broken radiator).

Cut up a ton of bacon (half the package would not be amiss here) and start cooking it. Think about how the flabby, hard-to-chop slices bear a passing resemblance to what may or may not be under that sweater. But don’t worry! Your Guy “digs” your winter curves, right? I hope you cut up enough bacon to make up for the fact that you started nibbling on it as soon as it got crispy. And if you even think about draining the bacon fat into the sink, just give up and go eat some cottage cheese, okay?

Crack three eggs into a bowl big enough to hold a pound of pasta, then add some cream. (Purists may tell you that Carbonara with cream is an abomination. I say, winter is really HARD, guys. Come on.) Whisk it around.

Grate a lot of Parmesan. How much? Til about the third time you grate your knuckle instead of the cheese — winter’s made them dry enough. Put the cheese in the egg-cream thing.

Now it gets serious. Save some pasta water, drain the pasta, and immediately dump it into the eggs ’n’ cream bowl. Top it with the bacon/grease concoction from the pan and STIR. Actually, get your man to stir. His biceps have started “feeling like mashed potatoes.”

Grate in a ton of black pepper and stir it some more, adding some of the pasta water if it looks a little dry. Now get to carbo-loading: just like an athlete during training, you’re getting ready for the best winter-curves-induced sex you’ll ever have.